The
president has said the right things about climate change – and has
taken some positive steps. But we're drilling for more oil and digging
up more carbon than ever

Two
years ago, on a gorgeous November day, 12,000 activists surrounded the
White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Signs we
carried featured quotes from Barack Obama in 2008: "Time to end the
tyranny of oil"; "In my administration, the rise of the oceans will
begin to slow."

Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even
then, there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were
too closely tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change
seriously. But in the two years since, it's looked more and more like
they were right – that in our hope for action we were willing ourselves
to overlook the black-and-white proof of how he really feels.

If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate
legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the
U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet's biggest oil producer and
Russia as the world's biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the
same years, even as we've begun to burn less coal at home, our coal
exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in
our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when
physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is
revving the engine.

You could argue that private industry, not the White House, has
driven that boom, and in part you'd be right. But that's not what Obama
himself would say. Here's Obama speaking in Cushing, Oklahoma, last
year, in a speech that historians will quote many generations hence. It
is to energy what Mitt Romney's secretly taped talk about the 47 percent
was to inequality. Except that Obama was out in public, boasting for
all the world to hear:

"Over the last three years, I've directed my administration to open
up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different
states. We're opening up more than 75 percent of our potential oil
resources offshore. We've quad­rupled the number of operating rigs to a
record high. We've added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the
Earth, and then some. . . . In fact, the problem . . . is that we're
actually producing so much oil and gas . . . that we don't have enough
pipeline capacity to transport all of it where it needs to go."

Actually,
of course, "the problem" is that climate change is spiraling out of
control. Under Obama we've had the warmest year in American history –
2012 – featuring a summer so hot that corn couldn't grow across much of
the richest farmland on the planet. We've seen the lowest barometric
pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and the
largest wind field ever measured, both from Hurricane Sandy. We've
watched the Arctic melt, losing three quarters of its summer sea ice.
We've seen some of the largest fires ever recorded in the mountains of
California, Colorado and New Mexico. And not just here, of course – his
term has seen unprecedented drought and flood around the world. The
typhoon that just hit the Philippines, according to some meteorologists,
had higher wind speeds at landfall than any we've ever seen. When the
world looks back at the Obama years half a century from now, one doubts
they'll remember the health care website; one imagines they'll study how
the most powerful government on Earth reacted to the sudden, clear
onset of climate change.

And what they'll see is a president who got some stuff done, emphasis
on "some." In his first term, Obama used the stimulus money to promote
green technology, and he won agreement from Detroit for higher
automobile mileage standards; in his second term, he's fighting for EPA
regulations on new coal-fired power plants. These steps are important –
and they also illustrate the kind of fights the Obama administration has
been willing to take on: ones where the other side is weak. The
increased mileage standards came at a moment when D.C. owned Detroit –
they were essentially a condition of the auto bailouts. And the battle
against new coal-fired power plants was really fought and won by
environmentalists. Over the past few years, the Sierra Club and a passel
of local groups managed to beat back plans for more than 100 new power
plants. The new EPA rules – an architecture designed in part by the
Natural Resources Defense Council – will ratify the rout and drive a
stake through the heart of new coal. But it's also a mopping-up action.

Obama loyalists argue that these are as much as you could expect from
a president saddled with the worst Congress in living memory. But that
didn't mean that the president had to make the problem worse, which he's
done with stunning regularity. Consider:

• Just days before the BP explosion, the White House opened much of
the offshore U.S. to new oil drilling. ("Oil rigs today generally don't
cause spills," he said by way of explanation. "They are technologically
very advanced.")

• In 2012, with the greatest Arctic melt on record under way, his
administration gave Shell Oil the green light to drill in Alaska's
Beaufort Sea. ("Our pioneering spirit is naturally drawn to this region,
for the economic opportunities it presents," the president said.)

• This past August, as the largest forest fire in the history of the
Sierra Nevadas was burning in Yosemite National Park, where John Muir
invented modern environmentalism, the Bureau of Land Management decided
to auction 316 million tons of taxpayer-owned coal in Wyoming's Powder
River basin. According to the Center for American Progress, the
emissions from that sale will equal the carbon produced from 109 million
cars.